223282 - [RFE] Hidden pref to specify location of training.dat ?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Rob Stow]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

On multi-boot systems, it is easy to edit the prefs for your various profiles so
that you have *one* set of mail and news data regardless of whether you booted
into Linux or Windows - except for your training.dat.    There is no reason
someone shouldn't be able to tell all of his profiles to use the same training.dat.

In other words, the user should be able to add a line like this to his prefs.js:
  user_pref("junkmail.training.filepath","C:\\ProfilePath\\training.dat");

This RFE is *not* a dupe of 
   Enable sharing of junk Bayesian database
   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181471
That RFE is about allowing *multiple users* share one training.dat.
This RFE is about enabling *one user* to have one training.dat instead of
forcing him to have multiple copies - one for every profile.

If we are going to let users share most of their mail and news data among their
  profiles, lets finish the job so that the training.dat associated with all of
that other mail/news data can also be shared. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

this cannot be done because of race condition concerns. You will end up
corrupting your training.dat file by reading / writing to it from multiple
profiles running at the same time.

You would be bypassing all of the profile locking code that is in place to keep
this condition from happening.

Comment 2

[Rob Stow]

I don't understand why it is dangerous to let training.dat be shared by all of
your profiles, yet all of the other mail/news data is OK ?  

In other words, I can have one inbox, one trash, one Junk, etc, shared by all of
my profiles, yet somehow the training.dat is magically susceptible to corruption
while the others are not ?   

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

a profile has only one trainin.dat file. All accounts use that single file. 

a profile can have multiple mail accounts in it. There is no race condition
here, they are all part of the same profile.

Your bug said you wanted multiple profiles to share a single training.dat file.
That's completely orthoganal to multiple mail accounts within a profile using
the training.dat file.

Comment 4

[Rob Stow]

I never said anything at all about multiple mail accounts in one profile.
That is a totally irrelevant side issue.

I was talking about having multiple *profiles* sharing the same set of 
physical files for the mail and news data.   Ie., if I boot into WinNT I have a
WinNT Thunderbird profile and if I boot into Linux I obviously have to have a
separate Linux TBird profile.  However, I do *not* have two inbox files, two
trash files, and so on - both profiles use the same physical files for my e-mail
and news data.  The one exception is that I have to have separate training.dat 
files.

In other words, if I run WinNT and download a bunch of e-mail, browse the
newsgroups, etc and then reboot into Linux, I do *not* need to do re-download
my mail, mark all the same newsgroups read, et cetera:  all the changes I made
in Windows are already there when I boot into Linux.  The only exception is my
training.dat - because I have no way to tell my Linux and Windows profiles to
use the same physical file.


So I repeat:  if my *profiles* can all share a single set of files for all of my
other mail and news data, then why can't they also share a single training.dat ?